Chapter 12
His fingers flexed. Flesh memory overrode muscle memory—these weren't the calloused hands of a frontline medic but the soft palms of a clan heir who'd never held a kunai. Wrongness prickled through his chakra coils. He exhaled through his teeth and watched his breath curl in the predawn chill. It carried the scent of damp earth and something richer underneath—rotten persimmons buried beneath Hashirama's favorite training ground. The Senju compound smelled exactly as he remembered. Exactly as it shouldn
't.
Twigs snapped thirty meters east. Not foraging animals—the rhythm was all wrong. Three, maybe four shinobi moving with the cautious syncopation of a perimeter sweep. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth and copied their footfalls into his marrow. Their chakra signatures bloomed behind his eyelids—two water-natured, one lightning, all stamped with the Senju clan's particular humidity. Family. Or what passed for it in this timeline. His fingers itched for a blade that wasn't there
.
The scent of persimmons grew stronger. Itama's childhood fear leaked through their merged chakra networks—a visceral, childish terror of disappointing Father. He grinned wetly. Let them come. Let them see what grew in the hollow of their dead heir's ribcage. The first birdcall of dawn sliced through the trees. Perfect. He'd always wanted to try Hashirama's famous morning sparring sessions from the other side of a kunai.
They came in formation—two scouts flanking, one center—standard Senju infiltration patterning. Their forehead protectors gleamed dull silver in the half-light. He exhaled, copying their postures into his muscle fibers, their breathing patterns into his diaphragm. The center shinobi froze mid-step, sandal hovering above a tripwire only visible to those who knew where Butsuma buried his traps. Recognition flared in the man's widened eyes. "Itama-sama...?"
The name tasted like maggots in his teeth. His stolen fingers flickered through hand seals older than this body's bones. Devour. His chakra lashed out in a whipcord of hunger, sinking into the nearest scout's sternum. The man's scream gurgled as veins of stolen chakra erupted across his skin, pumping lineage techniques and childhood memories straight into Itama's nervous system. The other scouts' kunai found his throat a half-second too late—their blades passed through mist as his newly copied Body Flicker dissolved his form.
He rematerialized behind them with their clansman's blood cooling on his lips. The lightning-natured one was already spinning, hands sparking with the Raijin technique he'd watched Tobirama invent three timelines ago. Itama licked his teeth. Oh, this would be delicious.
Their jutsu crashed through the trees in a blue-white arc—exactly where his old instincts would've dodged. Instead, he stepped into the voltage, letting it sear through his stolen nervous system as he copied its pattern into his chakra coils. Charred flesh peeled away, revealing fresh skin humming with stolen electricity. The scouts' synchronized inhales tasted like winter mornings and funeral pyres.
The eldest lunged with a grief-sharpened tanto. Itama caught the blade between his palms, savoring how the steel shrieked against his copied callouses. Up close, the man's eyes held the same shattered look Hashirama wore after Kawarama's death. His grin widened. "Tell Butsuma," he whispered, pulling the tanto deeper until warmth gushed over his wrists, "his weakest son sends regards."
Dawn broke properly as the last scout's body hit the dirt. Itama tilted his face to the light, tasting iron and ozone as copied memories settled into his marrow—secret hand signs, childhood betrayals, the exact pressure points Madara used when adjusting his armor. He flexed his fingers. Still too soft. But not for long.
The compound alarms began screaming—three short bursts, two long. Hashirama's personal signal. Itama chuckled wetly, wiping persimmon pulp from his chin where a stray kunai had grazed him. The pulp wasn't his. The blood was. Both thrilled him equally
.
Eastward, the trees trembled with approaching chakra—that unmistakable cedar-and-sap signature, bloated now with grief and fury. Itama inhaled deeply. There. That was the scent from his borrowed memories: big brother's rage after a failed ambush, thick enough to drown in. He stretched his stolen arms wide, tendons popping
.
"Come on then," he murmured to the shaking leaves, already copying Hashirama's footfall pattern from the vibrations in the earth. His grin split fresh as bark unspooled from his skin in perfect mimicry of the First Hokage's signature technique. The wood cracked louder than his laughter. "Let's see which one of us dies better this time."
The forest erupted. A spear of heartwood the thickness of a warhorse's thigh impaled the space where his ribs had been—but his body was already unraveling into the Raijin's stolen lightning, reforming fifteen meters up an oak as Hashirama's chakra roared beneath him like a flash flood. Itama blinked resin from his lashes, tasting the afterimage of their childhood summers in the sap
.
Hashirama's armor gleamed through the canopy, its plates shifting with the telltale hitch of a left shoulder injury—that old Uchiha arrow wound from the last timeline. Itama's borrowed heart stuttered. How many times had he stitched that wound closed in another life? His fingers twitched toward absent medic's tools before he caught himself and sank his copied teeth into his own wrist instead. Blood bloomed copper-bright as he painted stolen Senju hand seals onto the
bark.
The tree beneath him convulsed. Not an attack—a sob. Hashirama's face, twisted between fury and something far worse, split the wood grain inches from his own. "Itama," the name cracked like green timber, "why are you smiling like that?" The scent of crushed mint and childhood nightmares flooded his nostrils. Itama licked his brother's tears from the air and
laughed.
Wood rot spread through his copied veins. Not Mokuton—this was older. The clan's cursed binding technique, passed down through firstborns since before the Uchiha wars. Hashirama's hands trembled against the bark, each fingerprint birthing new seals that crawled up Itama's legs like starving vines. He sighed, admiring how the thorns pierced through stolen memories of lullab
ies.
Madara would've struck by now. But Hashirama—sweet, predictable Hashirama—hesitated that fatal half-second. Just long enough for Itama to bite through his own tongue and spit blood-soaked syllables into the sealing array. The vines blackened instantly, withering into ash that reeked of the Third War's mass graves. His brother's scream tasted like victory.
"Shinobi don't cry, anija," Itama crooned through the hole in his cheek, fingers already molding the ash into Tobirama's forbidden reanimation seals. The forest held its breath. Somewhere west, a dozen fresh corpses twitched in their blood-soaked earth. His borrowed chakra sang.
Hashirama's Mokuton lashed out—not the controlled strikes of a clan head, but the wild arcs of a brother breaking. Splintered oak rained down as Itama danced through the wreckage, catching splinters with his bare hands and copying their growth patterns into his marrow. His skin split with bark, then smoothed over with stolen Uchiha resilience
.
"Stop stealing faces!" Hashirama's roar shook persimmons from the trees. A particularly ripe one burst against Itama's forehead, filling his nostrils with the cloying sweetness of five summers past—the last season they'd picked fruit together. He licked pulp from his lips and copied the scent into his olfactory memory. Precious. He'd preserve this one
.
The first reanimated Senju scout erupted from the underbrush, jaw hanging by threads of Itama's lightning-charged chakra. Hashirama's hesitation lasted exactly 1.8 seconds—just long enough for Itama to sink teeth into the clone's wrist and drink deep of its Mokuton memories. The taste was... disappointing. Like chewing wax. He spat out a splinter of heartwood. "Your turn."
Hashirama's hands formed seals slower than Itama remembered—left pinky trembling where Madara's arrow had pierced the tendon last war. The wood dragon that erupted from the ground carried the scent of cedar and something darker—burial soil. Itama exhaled through his nose, copying the decay pattern even as fangs closed around his thigh. Blood wasn't supposed to smell like fresh-turned earth during the rainy season. Interesting.
Westward, the reanimated corpses hit the compound walls with the wet slap of meat on stone. Screams bloomed like poison flowers across the training grounds—but Hashirama's eyes never wavered. Too bad. Itama had hoped to taste that famous Senju compassion one last time. Instead, he got splinters under his nails as he gripped the dragon's tongue and whispered, "Remember Kawarama's funeral?" directly into its sap-filled veins.
The dragon convulsed. Its whimper sounded exactly like seven-year-old Hashirama begging their father for mercy. Perfect. Itama rode the collapsing beast down, drinking its death throes through their connected chakra networks—and oh, the flavors hidden in that scream: secret clan techniques, forbidden affection, the exact shade of blue Madara's armor straps had been when they first met. He licked bark from his teeth as the ground rushed up to meet them. Breakfast was served.
Hashirama's sandals skidded through crushed persimmons as he backpedaled, hands still half-formed in the next seal sequence. Itama counted the missing callouses on those fingers—three less than his timeline's version. Interesting. He lunged low, copying the exact angle Madara favored during their youth, and tasted copper as his teeth found purchase in Hashirama's wrist. The blood carried echoes of their mother's lullabies. He swallowed greedily.
Above them, the compound gates exploded outward. Twelve reanimated scouts moved with the jerky precision of pulled puppet strings, their eye sockets crackling with Itama's stolen lightning. The first to reach them still had Tobirama's senbon buried in its throat—a souvenir from last week's training session. Itama laughed against Hashirama's pulse point as the corpses formed perfect hand seals. Their combined Suiton techniques hit like a monsoon, drenching both brothers in water that smelled of the Naka River at high tide.
Hashirama gasped wetly through the deluge, his Mokuton splintering into useless kindling under the downpour. Itama pressed their foreheads together, sharing breath heavy with river silt and childhood promises. "You always did hesitate too long," he murmured, copying the exact pitch of Kawarama's voice from stolen memory. The sound broke something behind Hashirama's eyes. Good. Broken things were easier to devour.
The reanimated corpses flickered between techniques like a stuttering film reel—Uchiha fire dances melting into Senju tidal patterns, Hyūga gentle fist stances collapsing into Nara shadow stitches. Itama's skin bubbled with the overload, patches of his flesh momentarily becoming whatever clan's technique he'd last absorbed. A strip of Uchiha-red eyes blinked across his collarbone before dissolving into Aburame chitin.
Something hot and vital ruptured in Hashirama's chest—not a wound, but a sound. The first notes of their mother's lullaby, choked and warped through decades of grief, spilled between them. Itama's borrowed heart stuttered. He hadn't copied that memory yet. The song hit his eardrums like a kunai to the frontal lobe, unspooling decades of carefully constructed control. For three devastating seconds, he was just Itama again—small and scared and smelling of crushed persimmons
.
Then the moment shattered. Hashirama's fist plowed through his solar plexus with the force of a mountain landslide, embedding them both into the splintered remains of their childhood training dummy. The wood groaned, then bloomed. A thousand cherry blossoms erupted from the impact point, each petal sharp enough to flay flesh. Itama grinned through the storm of pink, tasting his own blood between teeth that weren't entirely human anymore.
The lullaby still echoed in his marrow like a ghost limb. He could feel its hooks in his chakra network, tugging at memories he hadn't realized he'd swallowed—a woman's hands braiding his hair, sticky persimmon juice on summer-chapped lips, Hashirama weeping silently behind the rice paper door. Useless sentiment. He bit down hard on his tongue, flooding his mouth with fresh copper to drown out the melody.
Hashirama's vines found purchase this time. They slithered up his legs with the intimate precision of shared childhood baths, their thorns injecting not poison but memories—Tobirama's first snowfall, Kawarama's feverish whispers, Father's disappointed sigh when Itama failed the shuriken test again. The vines tightened around his ribs in perfect mimicry of their mother's embrace. For one terrible heartbeat, he wanted to lean into it
.
Then the alarms changed pitch. A new chakra signature scorched the horizon—wildfire and inkstone, unmistakably Tobirama's. Itama's pupils dilated. His copied lips peeled back from teeth that had once belonged to an Uchiha elder. "Late as always," he murmured into Hashirama's sweat-slick neck, just as the first Hiraishin kunai embedded itself in the tree between them. The explosion of space-time chakra tasted like salvation and damnation in equal measure
.
Tobirama materialized in a crackle of displaced air, his scarred hands already weaving seals that didn't exist in this timeline. Itama's stolen memories recoiled—these weren't the Flying Thunder God variants he'd copied from corpses, but something older, darker. The air between them crystallized into fractal patterns that hurt to look at directly. Hashirama gasped as reality itself wrinkled around his brother's
fingertips
.
Itama's Devour technique flared on instinct, gulping down the warping spacetime like a drunkard guzzling sour wine. His stomach distended grotesquely as foreign chakra geometries collided with his stolen coils. Ribs popped. Veins blackened. Somewhere beneath the pain, he felt giddy—this was new. This was exciting. His tongue lolled as his jaw unhinged to accommodate the impossible feast
.
The last thing he saw before his vision inverted was Tobirama's eyes widening in horrified recognition. Interesting. In all the timelines, his second brother had never looked at him like that before. Then spacetime folded, and Itama Senju ceased to exist in exactly eleven places at once.
His reconstitution felt like being born backwards—joints clicking into place with wet snaps, stolen chakra scrambling to fill the sudden vacuum where his liver had been. He coughed up something that tasted of lightning-struck oak and Uchiha funeral incense. The ground beneath him wasn't ground at all, but the living flesh of Hashirama's Mokuton dragon, its wooden scales heaving with panicked breaths
.
Twelve meters above, Tobirama's hands froze mid-seal. The scent of scorched parchment and panic sweat rolled off him in waves—the same smell their father's study had during the Uchiha ambush of '43. Itama licked the spacetime residue from his teeth and grinned. "Didn't mother tell you?" he whispered through three different mouths simultaneously. "Never play with your food
."
The dragon screamed as his Devour technique activated in reverse—not consuming, but regurgitating. Eleven fractured copies of himself exploded outward in a geyser of half-digested chakra and borrowed body parts, each fragment screaming a different clan technique as they rained down upon the brothers. Somewhere in the carnage, a single persimmon seed landed perfectly in Tobirama's open mouth.